Theater District in Downtown, and The Galleria are also heavily visited tourist attractions. On July 26, 2003 the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau started "The Neighborhoods Alive: Houston's Multicultural Tour," a bus tour throughout several neighborhoods in inner Houston. The tour's destinations included Downtown Houston, the First Ward, the Second Ward, the Third Ward, the Sixth Ward, East Downtown, and Midtown. Two later bookings, those for August 23, 2003 and September 2003, quickly sold out. Therefore, the bureau added six more dates on short notice. Around 2006 Taiwanese people became owners of several independent and small chain hotels in the Houston area. In December 2006 C.Y. Ling, the director of the commercial division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Houston, said that Taiwanese owned more hotels than any other ethnic group except for the Indians. Retail In 1980, a year of strong economic activity and robust competition in the grocery market, prices in Houston's grocery stores were below the national average prices in grocery stores. Houston's grocery price index averaged at 85.6, below the national average of 88.4. This means that, for the 1982-1984 base period, Houstonians paid $88.40 for an amount of food that would cost $100 according to the national average. During the oil bust and the economic decline, Houston's prices stayed even with the national average. In 1983 Houston's grocery index increased from 96.8 to 99.4 and matched the national average of 99.1. As the city began to recover, the prices began to edge upward. When a recession in the U.S. began and while Houston's economic growth slowed and continued, the national price index fell below Houston's price index. As of 1992 prices in Houston's grocery stores were higher than the national average; Houston's index averaged to be 137.3, and the national average was 132.3. Nic Santangelo, an analyst of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a department of the U.S. Department of Labor that composes the monthly consumer price index, said in 1992 "We have a difficult time explaining why Houston food prices go one way, Dallas another, and the nation yet another." A person quoted in the Houston Post described as an industry insider said that when companies in the Houston grocery market left, the surviving competitors "got comfortable" and raised prices. Tammy Bobon, a director of public affairs for AppleTree Markets, said that the Houston grocery market had remained competitive for the